Péter Siklós

István Tringli

King Matthias
and the
Medieval Hungarian State

 

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Matthias Corvinus came to the Hungarian throne 550 years ago, in 1458. The most illustrious of all the country’s monarchs in the late Middle Ages, he reigned for thirty-two years, until 1490. He was not a member of a princely family: his father, John (1407–56), was the son of a Transylvanian lesser noble who, thanks to his outstanding talents as a warrior and statesman under Sigismund of Luxembourg², had risen to the position of Voivode of Transylvania (1441–56) and later Regent (1446–53) of Hungary. Incidentally, in Bohemia the estates had shortly before, in the same year of 1458, elected to the kingship George of Podiebrad (1420–71), another nobleman who was not of royal blood.

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Matthias was an enthusiastic supporter of the new humanism and a number of eminent Italians found places at his court. Thus, it was in Hungary under Matthias’s aegis that Renaissance architecture first appeared north of the Alps, the royal palaces in Buda and Visegrád being partly reconstructed in the Renaissance style.

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István Tringli
is a fellow of the Institute of History of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. He specialises in Late Medieval Hungarian history and legal and settlement history.